Flesh House - why did I write it?
(AKA: what the hell is wrong with you?)
The whole basis for FLESH HOUSE was meant to be a subplot for my third book, BROKEN SKIN. Something nasty slithers up from the past and bites Aberdeen's finest on the backside. Literally. But as soon as I started planning that book it quickly became apparent that this was going to be way too big to squeeze in as a subplot. It wanted a book of its own. A big book. A big, dark, nasty book.
That's what it got. FLESH HOUSE was an absolute sod to write - easily the most difficult one so far - I have no idea why. Maybe it's because I've always wanted to write something really dark? Not blood-and-gore-dark (though there is a fair amount of that), but proper stays-with-you-in-the-dead-of-night dark. The kind of book that makes you wake up in the wee small hours wondering if that's just a shadow in the corner, or if there's someone in the room*.
I also got to really torture a lot of the main characters, which is always fun in a series. If they wanted an easy life they shouldn't have been born fictional.
And the main idea behind it all? What happens when someone decides that cannibalism is a team sport, and everyone gets to play?
There was also a pretty strong theme through the book, though not one that a lot of people picked up on, which is about taking responsibility for the meat that you eat. In the book, the Flesher's method of dispatching his victims is almost identical to the way all the lamb, beef, and pork we eat is killed and prepared. The only difference is that it's now illegal to use a pithing cane due to BSE. At the time I was coming up with the idea for the Flesher, I was in the middle of looking for a new butcher. The one we used all the time had moved on to pastures brown, so we went on the hunt for someone we could trust to produce high-quality meat from good sources. And a lot of that wound its way into the book as well.
* Actually, one of my test readers - a lovely and talented writer who come up with these incredibly dark and twisted books - gave herself a dose of the screaming nightmares by reading Flesh House. I'm not sure if I should be flattered by that or not...